Oracle Blog

Thursday Feb 26, 2015

Integrated,
high availability IT infrastructure capabilities are critical for reducing
downtime and costs, and creating ideal performance and SLA results. In this
next session of the Oracle Open World 2014 series, Shari Yamaguchi and Frances
Zhao from Oracle’s Product Management team share best practices on how to
architect highly available multi-data center solutions. They also share what real world customers are doing to achieve
maximum available architectures with WebLogic Server—so be sure to check out
the video itself here (http://bit.ly/oow14cafsessions)for those highly relevant case studies and proven
strategies.

What
is Maximum Availability Architecture (MAA)?

Maximum availability architecture
(MAA) incorporates the high availability solutions that Oracle has invested in
and built out across the stack. The key focus is on ensuring customers’ businesses
and applications can fully meet their end-user community’s needs and
requirements. In today’s world, downtime is no longer an option, but a
given—and this is why Oracle has strategically invested in end-to-end MAA solutions
to ensure your systems stay up and running across the board. At the end of the
day, the #1 priority is that your end users can get to the environments and
applications they need to within a specified period of time.

MAA
Strategy & Investment

Within IT, customers need a quick
way to easily get a view of what's going on across all their data centers,
environments, and applications so that in case of a sudden performance
degradation or failure, alerts are immediately sent to the right administrators.
Given the importance of manageability, Oracle has invested significantly in
Enterprise Manager Grid Control (EMGC), building tools within EMGC for easier
monitoring and management such as job systems for automated patching and backup.
The Oracle Traffic Director has also been a key tool in connecting the
management console to the middle-tier—it is a front-end WebLogic Server that
handles web-tier requests and routes them to different clusters.

From a Database 12c perspective,
features like Flashback provde significant capabilities especially for those
connected to applications, because customers can bring up a test environment,
read and write against that environment, validate, shut it back down, flash it
back to a previous state, and continue rolling forward through a recovery. Active
GridLink, Data Guard, and Site Guard are also key investment areas that allow
seamless and automatic failover between different RAC instances. Finally, Coherence
is another big investment area as it is a high-end caching product that provides an
integrated solution with WebLogic. With session replication, Coherence can be
used not only to offset your data from database, but also could be
high-availability disaster recovery solution for your WebLogic Server session
state.

Core
Technologies and MAA Features

To support these core investments in
maximum availability, there are three primary areas of technology that Oracle
focuses on implementing to support MAA in its platform architecture. The first
area is management configuration monitoring—with Enterprise Manager and Site
Guard, we monitor your product across different data centers. The second area
is in RPO (recovery point objective)—which is related to how fast you can move
your data for replication and for recovery—Oracle is investing in file base
data replication. And finally, for RTO (recovery time objective)—which is
related to how fast you can recover your transactions—one huge new feature is
XA transaction recovery, removing the need to write every transaction statement
in the T-log and making transactions automatically recoverable.

In conclusion, MAA is extremely
critical to your business, which is why it is a huge priority for Oracle. The complete Oracle Solution is a global-level management configuration with
Enterprise Manager, RPO, and RTO runtime for the middle-tier (including WebLogic, Coherence, and Oracle Traffic
Director), and an integrated back-end database. Any one-tier disaster recovery adds
value but the real importance lies in connecting all the pieces together, to
maximize operational efficiency and minimize risk.

Friday Sep 20, 2013

Oracle WebLogic Server on Oracle Database Appliance offers a
complete solution for building and deploying enterprise Java EE applications in
a fully integrated system of software, servers, storage, and networking that
delivers highly available database and WebLogic services.
In this session, we will discuss how WebLogic is deployed on Database Appliance
virtual environment and what the benefits of deploying to this platform are.

Friday Aug 30, 2013

Oracle WebLogic Active GridLink for RAC is the
market-leading mid-tier integration solution leveraging additional Oracle RAC
advancements. Oracle and NEC have jointly invested on verifying and testing the
Active GridLink for RAC solution which provides a high-availability, scalability and high performance solution for
helping customer building mission critical applications. In addition, WebLogic
Server is the only application server which has been fully integrated and
certified with Oracle Database without losing any capabilities in Java EE
implementation with respect to security, transaction, connection pooling , management, and
more.

NEC has constructed high availability systems with WebLogic
Server and Oracle Real Application Cluster. It investigated advantages and
features of the GridLink data source focusing on high availability and
flexibility that GridLink data source achieves in integrating with Oracle RAC. The
purpose of these tests is to get high serviceability by diverting system
integration know-how of JDBC data source already storing, in addition to using
these functions. The following are functions which the GridLink data sources were tested for.

1.Runtime
Connection Load Balancing(RCLB)

2.Web
Session Affinity

3.Fast
Connection Failover (FCF)

4.Performance
Improvement by Dynamic Changes in RAC
Topology

Join us in this OpenWorld session as we discuss the detailed
Active GridLink capabilities and the testing results obtained by NEC. We will
also discuss the new functionality introduced with Oracle Database 12c.

Thursday May 10, 2012

Are you doing something unique and innovative with Oracle WebLogic and related products?

Submit a nomination today for the Oracle Fusion Middleware Innovation Awards. Winners receive a free pass to Oracle OpenWorld 2012 in San Francisco (September 30 - October 4th) and will be honored during a special event at OpenWorld.